A repository for info that otherwise would have leaked out of my synapses.

Coping with Renamed user Accounts in sharepoint

Yesterday I received a strange error report from a person trying to create a new SharePoint site collection. Our front line guy went to investigate and found that she was getting a “User cannot be found” error out of SharePoint when attempting to complete the self-service site creation process. This person reported that her last name changed recently, along with her user ID, yet SharePoint will still showing her as logged in under her old name.

Linking the “Correlation ID” up to the diagnostic logs was of no great help. The diagnostic logs simply reported “User cannot be found” when executing the method “Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite.SelfServiceCreateSite”. We are able to see that “ownerLogin”, “ownerEmail”, and “ownerName” strings were being passed to this function, but not what the values of those strings were. I guessed that the web form was passing the person’s old account login name to the function, and that since this data was no longer valid, an error was getting displayed. But how to fix this?

SharePoint 2010 (and WSS 3.0 before it) keeps a list of Site Users that can be accessed using the SharePoint Web “SiteUsers” property. This list is updated every time a new user logs in to the site. The list entries contain username, login identity, email address, and security ID (SID) data. It also appears that Site User data is not updated when user data changes in Active Directory (as long as the SID stays the same, that is). Additional user account data is stored in XML data in the SharePoint databases, and can be accessed using the SharePoint Web “SiteUserInfoList” property. All of this data needs to be purged from the root web site so that our hapless user can once again pass valid data to the SelfServiceCreateSite method.

Presumably the Site Management tools could be forced to get the job done, but the default views under SharePoint 2010 are hiding all site users from me, even when I log in as a site administrator. Let’s try PowerShell instead:

add-pssnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell
$root = get-spweb -identity "https://sharepoint.uvm.edu/"
# "Old ID" below should be all or part of the user's original login name:
$oldAcc = $root.SiteUsers | ? {$_.userLogin -match "oldID"}
#Let's see if we found something:
$oldAcc.LoginName
#Remove the user from the web's SiteUsers list:
$root.SiteUsers.Remove($oldAcc.LoginName)
$root.Update()
#Let's see if it worked:
$id = $oldAcc.ID
$root = get-spweb -identity "https://sharepoint.uvm.edu/"
$root.SiteUsers.GetByID($id)
# (This should return a "User cannot be found" error.)
#Now to see what is in SiteUserInfoList:
$root.SiteUserInfoList.GetItemById($id)
# (This data can be cleaned up in the browser by visiting:
# " /_catalogs/users/simple.aspx"
# from your site collection page.)

Update, 2015-12-04:
You actually can do this in the SharePoint site administration UI as well. As a site administrator, call up the membership of any site group by visiting Site Actions -> Site Settings -> People and Groups, then select a group. Note the URL in your browser:
https://sharepoint.uvm.edu/sites/[siteName]/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=3
Now just change the trailing number to “0”, and reload the page. You will get a list of all users of the site. Delete the user with outdated metadata, and then re-add them to the site.